Introduction

For the last two years Ant Marketing has been providing an outbound appointment generation and database build function for one of the largest worldwide financial institutions. Essentially, Ant Marketing is tasked with generating sales appointments for a variety of business-to-business banking divisions, including invoice finance, asset finance, business banking and business mortgages.

Objectives & Target Audience

The campaign is an ongoing contract management programme. The objectives are as follows:

• To generate appointments and sales leads for the various divisions, based upon agreed criteria.
• To generate a comprehensive database for both re-contact and direct marketing activity
• To increase the awareness of the brand, specific product offerings and messages within the marketplace
• To provide the direct marketing team with market research information The primary target market is SMEs within predetermined vertical and geographical markets.

The Challenges & Solutions

The First Challenge

To ensure each of the appointments presents the sales team with a short-, medium- or long-term opportunity to generate business.

The Solution

Ant Marketing use a variety of mechanisms to ensure the challenge is met, including:

• Ensuring the team are fully briefed on each of the divisions
• Agreeing and adhering to predetermined criteria for a qualified appointment, i.e.
  • Decision-making capability
  • Timescale of decision to purchase
  • Financial level of purchase
• Utilising a robust quality control procedure that ensures appointments meet criteria

The Second Challenge

To ensure that Ant Marketing report comprehensively and accurately (this is essential as the process includes a high degree of testing of different data sources)

The Solution

Ant Marketing has devised a comprehensive but flexible database. This ensures comprehensive but flexible weekly reports.

To facilitate diary management

Each salesperson provides their diaries on Outlook, thereby providing for immediate access and updating by Ant Marketing.

To ensure the highest level of product knowledge 

Here the solution has been as follows:

• Providing (often via the client) extensive initial and ongoing training
• Creating a stable, dedicated team for the project

Undertaking ongoing product knowledge assessment (independent of operations, every month Ant Marketing's Training Division makes an assessment of each operative and, dependent upon the results, provides additional training)